


Pause (constellations and the echoes of gunfire)

by Lia (Liafic)



Category: Gundam Wing
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-06-02
Updated: 2011-06-02
Packaged: 2017-10-20 00:40:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 991
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/206957
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Liafic/pseuds/Lia
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Heero searches for answers and finds them in unlikely places.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Pause (constellations and the echoes of gunfire)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Bloody_winged](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Bloody_winged/gifts).



Heero spends the first few months after the war wandering, in search of something nameless and meaningful that will set him back on the right path. He goes to school, does contract work, learns to accept the surreal and inconsistent nature of peace. Sometimes he sees her in the shifting constellation of his memories, and it is impossible to forget her face when she is painted over every television screen and splashed across his consciousness like the blind imprint of sunlight.

They almost met at a spaceport in L1. She was surrounded by reporters, and he was a student carrying a tattered suitcase. When he saw her he stopped breathing, stopped hearing. The world broke into fragments of strawberry blond and sea blue, and they drifted past one another like distant stars. For barely more than a heartbeat, he was sure that she saw him and that something beautiful (the answer he has been searching for) flitted across her face. Then she was gone. He wonders if she even recognised him, if she equated the restless ghost of her memory with the figure of the student in the spaceport, the figure of someone staggering under the absence of weight on his shoulders. 

.

Duo calls him every once in a while, out of the blue and from various locations across Earth and the colonies. Their conversations are short, mostly one sided, filled with pauses where static fills in for the absence of words. They leave him feeling hollow and grasping, like there is something just out of his reach that he should be clinging to in order for life to make sense. The memory of war has tainted everything with echoes of gunfire and hot metal, the meaninglessness of it all lurking at the edge of his thoughts like some shadowed and feral animal. 

Today the call comes from somewhere in the Pacific. He is on a Sweepers vessel, he says. Something about a deep-sea scavenging mission. The roar of the ocean is so loud in the distance that Heero can barely hear him. 

_“So it’s like—this job, right? The paycheque is good and all. I don’t know.”_

“What’s not to know?” 

_“I got a thing going. With a girl.”_

“Yeah?” 

_“Sure. Just been a while since I saw her. Maybe it’s time for me to settle down.”_

“Whatever works for you.” 

_“Ever think things will be normal with us?”_

“Normal . . .” 

_“After the war normal. Like—steady job, steady girl. You want that?”_

“Is that what you want?” 

_“Sure is. Living the dream or whatever. Just waiting for the day when it all falls into place.”_

“I’m still figuring it out.” 

_“Yeah.”_ Static and laughter against the crash of waves. _“Aren’t we all.”_

.

She wrote him a letter, once. 

When he thinks about it, he still can’t figure out how he knew it was from her. There was no return address, just the familiar slanted cursive across the front of the envelope. He held it in his hands, set it down on the counter, and did not open it for days. It sat in his blank apartment, listening to the hum of the radiator, and it was there every time he woke up and every night before he slept. His dreams were haunted by the image of her, a warm and blurry form with soft skin and bright eyes. On the fifth day he finally opened it, heart beating so fast in his chest that he just wanted to run until exhaustion choked all feeling out of him. 

_Dear Heero,_

He tore it up without reading any more, letting the pieces drift down like so many snowflakes. 

No need to break with tradition. 

.

He is there on the day of the dedication, and if he stops concentrating, the memorial wall just fades into the snow until the landscape is a blur of white, and the vibration of his phone is like coming out of a dream. 

_“So I might be like three metres away from you right now.”_

“Tell me you’re joking.” 

_“No. I’m in Geneva. At the ceremony.”_

“I can’t see you.” 

_“Yeah, well. I got a haircut.”_

The signal cuts out and then Duo is standing beside him, shuffling from foot to foot and breathing out in a mist against the collar of his jacket. His hair is shorter, falling across his forehead and wet from snow, and for a minute Heero does not associate him with war or death or anything but someone standing in a crowded square. Someone he knows or used to know. 

“Talk about cold,” Duo mutters. 

“What are you doing here?” 

“Same thing you are, I guess.” 

The light is fading slowly, the sky a bruised sort of violet illuminated by floodlights. He never got used to the cold, the mercurial weather of the earth. 

“Duo—it’s good to see you.” 

A smirk, and he shoves his hands into his pockets. “You came to see her. I mean, you don’t have to deny it.” 

“Why would I deny it?” 

“We talked a bit. She was in L2. And she gets it, you know? The war and everything.” 

“I know.” 

“She asked about you.” 

Silence falls. 

Relena ascends the platform with the same measured grace that he remembers from years ago, when they were both young and the world was falling apart around them. Maybe every other person here is exactly like him, holding on to the desperate hope that she will give him a reason to live. That she will give it all some meaning and justify the sacrifices that are etched into the wall behind her. Maybe Duo is here to find the same unspoken clarity that he has been searching for all these years, the thing that is locked beneath her skin, in a place he cannot reach, where language means nothing. 

For the first time in months, he wonders what she wrote in that letter. 

Maybe one day, he will ask.


End file.
